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Ynglet (PC) by dkirschner (Dec 14th, 2024 at 17:03:55) |
Chill little arcade game that was an Amazon freebie. You control this creature, which reminds me of a long snake/dragon, and basically navigate it around each level with the aim of getting various pickups, including the one at the end that completes the level. The levels are 2d planes. You can move in any direction, but gravity pulls you downward when you are outside geometric shapes. Inside the shapes, you are unaffected by gravity. So, to move through the levels, you basically "jump" from shape to shape. There is a "dash" move, which helps you jump up or across long distances. There are other surfaces: the blue ones bounce you like trampolines unless you dash through them, while the orange ones bounce you only if you dash into them. It's pretty straightforward, and there are difficulty modes which, as it gets harder, reduces the frequency of safe shapes (and, I assume, either shrinks blue and orange surfaces or places more of them as obstacles). One neat thing is how Ynglet handles checkpoints. If you pause within any geometric shape and wait like 5 seconds, the game creates a checkpoint right there, and you begin there when you die. It was a really cool way to save, something between a manual save and an autosave. The main game is just over an hour long, and there are some extra "levels," which all feel like unfinished concepts. Simple, somewhat interesting game.
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ICEY (PC) by dkirschner (Dec 13th, 2024 at 18:25:47) |
Picked this up because it was supposed to be a clever unreliable narrator / narrator messes with you type game (like Stanley Parable or something). It is a game in such a genre, but it's not nearly as clever or funny as Stanley Parable, Pony Island, The Beginner's Guide, Superliminal, etc., etc. It's short, there's not a lot of substance, it's combat-heavy, and the combat is not great.
You play as ICEY, a cyborg that is going after the big bad boss, Judas. On the way, you'll kill lots of other bosses and (often annoying) enemies. You'll upgrade some moves, and you'll listen to the narrator. The narrator really only has one "trick," and that is to tell you to follow the arrows (and then get frustrated with you when you don't). Yes, you'll die a couple times by not following the arrows, but obviously (videogame logic), you should explore and not follow the arrows. Exploring gets you more cash and more upgrades from secret areas, plus some cool fourth-wall breaking developer commentary (my favorite part of the whole game). Following the arrows takes you on the straight path.
I accidentally tuned it to "hard" difficulty and when it got really, really difficult right at the end, I realized that I couldn't manually change it to easy. I actually watched the last boss on YouTube. This would have been cooler if I'd never played any of the aforementioned games. Neat, sure, but in 2024, it doesn't stand up like it might have when it came out in 2016.
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Hades (PC) by jp (Dec 12th, 2024 at 21:55:59) |
I'll admit that I was skeptical of Hades - not that it wasn't a good game, but rather that I would enjoy it. This is mostly because my current memory is that I played Bastion and Transistor and thought they were ok, but not "OMG this is the best thing ever" as sentiment at the time seemed to indicate. So, I thought that this time around, I'd have some fun perhaps but would ultimately be "meh" about Hades.
And I was wrong. I mean, I started playing - very surprised that it sort of jumps right in with no tutorial or explanation - eventually died and wanted to jump right back in again. And, I've been doing that for a bit now.
The game is definitely compelling in that way - you get random boons, you wonder how they work, how they combine with others, and off you go again. And, each time around there's some little detail that's new: a new character, some dialogue with an NPC, etc. so you feel like you're really making forward progress.
So far I've gotten to the 3rd big area boss - haven't defeated yet..and things have started to turn. I'm starting to get a bit tired, almost bored...and the game feels a bit grindy. You have to go again and again to make very little progress in the meta... if I was a better player I might have won already - but I'm not. So, I'm sort of stuck grinding away.
I'll turn god mode on - it gives you some defense against damage - and it gets better each time you die. (more grind?) We'll see how far I'm able to make it - I am curious to see the end. Definitely will not be doing the extra meta-game end stuff though...
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Maneater (PC) by dkirschner (Dec 9th, 2024 at 20:56:22) |
Patrick and I decided to bail on Maneater. Neither of us is feeling the shark RPG. The beginning was fun. You're a big-ass shark and you chomp on people on the beach, on their boats, in the water. Their screaming, the blood, the way you can thrash around, is all hilarious. But then it turns out that was your shark mom, and you're actually a little shark at first, and you start in a super boring place and have to get bigger by eating super boring fish. The game appears to be a massive grind-fest. I don't know how long it takes to get bigger, into open water, to where you're back rampaging on beaches, but we played a couple hours and we're just eating like "level 7 clownfish" or whatever, collecting resources for upgrades, and still trying to figure out how to jump effectively. And getting chased by giant crocodiles from time to time that are double our level. Pass.
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Untitled Goose Game (PC) by jp (Dec 1st, 2024 at 20:35:49) |
Ok, this was fun, but not THAT fun.
It's - perhaps unexpectedly, more of a puzzle game than a chaotic "goat simulator" game? I knew it wasn't wild chaos like goat simulator - but it was definitely more sedate and structured than I imagined. But, it's fun - and the task list is really neat. It basically layers a puzzle on top of another. From the item on the list - I need to figure out what the puzzle is (how do I do the thing or, for trickier ones, create a situation such that the thing that needs doing gets done) and then figure out how to execute it.
I've cleared the first two areas - I think there are two or three more? So, not a very long/big game. I think. The new areas might be huge? I doubt it.
My main concern is that since I imagine the puzzles will become more convoluted, I'm worried that the wonkiness in the controls (mostly the thing the goose is locked on to seems wonky at times) will lead to a spike in frustration later on. I hope I'm wrong but we'll see.
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GameLog hopes to be a site where gamers such as yourself keep track of the games that
they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
you still consider yourself to be playing the game. If it's closed, you finished playing the game. (it doesn't matter
if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
for that game. Call it a weblog of game playing activity if you will.
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2262 registered gamers and 3216 games. 7740 GameLogs with 13225 journal entries. 5098 games are currently being played.
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Halo 3 (360) by psettle |
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most recent entry: Friday 8 February, 2008
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Gameplay:
I got pretty far but about a couple of levels after my first gamelog, I had to change the difficulty to Heroic because it was just getting a little easy to get past levels. After I change my difficulty, a lot of unique stuff started to happen when I tried to kill my enemies. First off, the enemies AI went up almost a factor of 10. Now the enemy uses unique grenades to try and kill me off. Some of these grenades do different things, such as create a large impenetrable shield around the user for a short period of time, drain the shields off any person that is caught in its path, recharge any units shield that is within the range of it, and create like a wall that you can peek around to shoot at enemies. What made this really cool and challenging was multiple levels, the Brutes would through down Bubble Shields, stay in the bubble shield, and force you to come inside and kill them. This proved quite challenging because most of the enemies that stayed inside of these shields would carry large explosive weapons that would destroy you if you got too close. The Brutes would also throw drain grenades to drain all of my health and then come in to try and finish me off, or they would drop a recharge grenade and while I would try to kill them, they would heal at the same time, making my attack almost useless.
Another thing I thought was cool about the enemy AI was the use of the smaller Grunt units to perform some unique tasks to ultimately get me killed faster. First off, the Grunts would sometimes run to a Bubble shield that was active, so as a player you would want to kill them, but instead run after them, enter the shield to finish them off, and come face to face with the blunt end of a grenade launcher that had a pretty sharp edge to it. The Grunts would also come up to me sometimes holding two live grenades in their hands, trying to be like a kamikaze unit, and blow me up while they to were killed as well. I can't begin to count the times that happened to me, after I had just disposed of a group of Brutes in the same area. But the thing I loved the most about the enemies improvement was the semi-boss battles against these walking tank units known as Scarabs. In Halo 2, you only had to destroy 1 Scarab and were linearly led up to attack it because it stalled at a predetermined point so you could board it and kill all the enemies. But this time, you have to fire rockets or tank rounds at its legs to get it to crouch to the ground, then board it and destroy the reactor for it to be completely killed. This proved to be a challenging task because the Scarab would fire a large plasma beam that would instantly kill you if it touched you, so riding around in a slow tank trying to fire at it would ultimately end up in you dying about 80% of the time. But I loved how you are just 1 genetically enhanced super solider and you are able to take down this massive, destructive machine all by yourself.
Design:
One of the first things that makes this such a good game is the design of the enemy AI. Off the bat, you instantly can tell a huge difference in how the Brutes organize their attacks against you. In Halo 2, Brutes didn't have much of a personality and thus weren't able to construct well thought out plans of how to kill you. You could basically just launch a grenade at them or fire you rifle at them and they would go down. But this time they organize better and pull of some unique skills that make them a truly challenging enemy. I thought that the way that they commanded other units to kind of lure you to them was pretty interesting as well. The games new AI engine in general is just such an improvement over the other games because I had to really think out my attack plans before I would go in and try to blast my way through them. This time the enemy would take advantage of the unique secondary grenades, surroundings, and a better arsenal to try and eliminate me. The design of this enhanced AI system would scare away some players due to the difficulty of getting through the levels, but as a serious FPS player, this made for a much better gameplay experience and as such a more pleasurable feeling when you were able to kill your way through this onslaught of intelligent creatures.
Halo 3 also seemed to try and capture some of the elements that made the first Halo game a success. In this game, they brought back some of the older weapons, such as the classic assault rifle that was fully automatic and not just a 3 round burst mode, and the classic pistol, that had a small scope to it, over the pistol that was available to you in Halo 2, that didn't have a scope. This addition of the old weapons was great because I personally liked the old assault rifle, but at certain points in the game I would carry both the old assault rifle and the new assault rifle just so I could have one weapon that would be good for up close and personal attacks and something that was good for long range head shots.
The graphics in this Halo game were also a huge improvement over the second and first Halo games, due to the large amounts of detail that went into the environments. On one level, you are in a desert like area and you truly feel like you are part of a real life desert, but in reality you aren't. The designers also seemed to put emphasis on old, classic material when they thought of some of the levels. A small amount of the levels seemed to have similar aspects as those in the previous games. In particular, it seemed in the final level, that I was almost playing the same exact level as the first Halo game. Overall, the design of Halo 3 was beautiful and very well developed, and as such makes this final installment of the Halo series a great conclusion to a gaming series that has changed the way FPS are played.
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